Pilot's Fate
by Garfield71
Summary: What the movie didn't show. Snippets from Raleigh's life and the Kaiju war.
1. Chapter 1

The adrenalin that kept him going during the fight had long worn off. Headache, dizziness and nausea were building as he walked Gipsy the last few miles up to the coast line, he was dimly aware that it was the price that everyone who dared to pilot a Jaeger solo had to pay, but he didn't care. Neither did he care that it was freezing cold in the conn-pod with part of the cranium plating ripped away, or the searing ache of his left arm, where the malfunctioning sensor suit had seared his skin and nerve endings when the Kaiju had chewed through it's robotic counterpart and finally torn it off.

All that mattered was the pain and fear that had had burned itself into his synapses, aftershocks of it still reverberating through his mind as a drift echo, and the gaping emptiness where his brother and co-pilot should have been in his mind, firing away his trademark silly jokes and torturing him with embarrassing flashes of his love life on the way back to the base after an accomplished mission.

"Yancy!" he cried out in despair. But he was alone! The deadly silence was only broken by the wheezing and moaning of the Jaeger's damaged inner mechanics and his own laboured gasps for breath.

Communicaton was dead, so where most of the automated processes, like the parking mode. Through the haze of the shock and pain he didn't even know why he was keeping the battered machine walking. If he just let his attention slip for a moment, if he stumbled, he could have followed the one person that mattered most in his life, the ice cold waters of the arctic sea surely making it a quick and merciful end. Was it some primal survival instinct that made him take step after painful step? As a rule, Jaeger pilots died together, just as they fought together, but some part of him was not yet ready. An overwhelming feeling of guilt washed over him as he made the machine trudge through the increasingly shallow water. He was a coward.

It was his fault that his brother was dead, he had become so complacent, it had been the the hubris of the ace pilot that had made him believe this Kaiju would be an easy kill, had made him let down his guard when the beast had let go and submerged, only to rear his ugly head in that fatal surprise attack.

With the last of his strength he made it up to the beach, then he couldn't hold it together any longer. He stumbled and with him the collossal structure of his Jaeger went down, creaking and shuddering in it's death throes.

He managed to unfasten the clasps when he came to hang head down in the now useless harness, he cried out as another wave of pain flashed through him when he slumped down into the visor of the conn-pod, landing on his injured arm. He wished for oblivion to take him, but it wouldn't come.

He couldn't bear the wretched place any longer, he scrambled to his feet and stumbled out into the bleak Alaskan winter morning, through the gaping hole that the Kaiju had torn into the hull and once more cried out his lost brother's name. He realized that he was not alone, or was the man standing there, gaping at him just a figment of his crazed imagination? He didn't care, he turned, for a moment taking in the image of his fallen Jaeger, trying to understand what had just happened, then looked down at himself, noticing that he was bleeding. An irresistible light headedness took hold of him, erasing the madness that was ravaging his mind like a cold white blanket that matched the snowy landscape. He stumbled, was falling he realized, but he couldn't muster the energy to care. With the muttered name of his brother on his lips and the certainty that he was going to follow him merciful blackness engulfed him.


	2. Little Cogwheels (part one)

Hi folks. Here I want to give account of how the Anchorage fight could have worked out. Of course the scenario in the movie makes it a bit difficult because we see Yancy and Raleigh getting up at 2, hurrying to suit up, then the fight during the stormy night then the Jaeger apparently disappears from any kind of tracking technology until it goes down in the morning, in the countryside, and the weather is calm. Also one would think that the grandfather/kid pair should have heard about the Jaeger/Kaiju battle that had taken place that night somewhere in their area.

Now considering the location of Anchorage, it a bit tricky to come up with a halfway credible scenario to fill those hours until the Jaeger goes down at probably around 6 o'clock in the morning (assuming that sunrise in the beginning of May is at 5.50 and that's a time of year when snow is still likely), but I did my best, showing the night/morning and the Kaiju war in general from the perspective of someone working at that shatterdome.

If anyone living in Anchorage is reading this, yes, I did a bit of tweaking and didn't stay entirely true to the location, particularly the distances of the Cook Inlet, but it was the only way to make this scenario work at all. Sorry, folks.

I hope you like my interpretation of that night.

And oh, it's completely romance free, no little OC girlies flirting with Rangers :-))

...

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2 Little Cogwheels (part one)

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Dr. Soren Hangeland of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, current deployed with the PPDC, Shatterdome Anchorage, cursed liberally when the blaring alarm startled him awake.

It was followed by a very familiar female voice; that sterile, computer generated voice that made most of the announcements annoyed him to no ends and hearing it first thing in the morning, or rather in the middle of the night was even worse.

Ten days ago the tell tale activities had been detected in the Breach, the dimensional portal 30 miles south of the Chinese coast that connected earth to the home of the alien invaders. This time the the giant creepy-crawly that had emerged from it had been heading south-west for some time but since then it had vanished from the satellite images. Which was always a bad sign, they could resurface anywhere in the Pacific area, from New Zealand to Vladivostok, from Patagonia to Papua New Guinea. The arctic hadn't been visited by the aliens for eight months, so Alaska was more than overdue.

His role in this operation was that of a medical officer, to be more precise, he was the surgeon on emergency duty and so far the night had been uneventful. With a groan he rolled out of his cot and patted over to the monitor that had flickered to life in the corner of his stuffy cell. Radar signals just outside Anchoarage bay, intercept estimated around 4.30, he read. A Kaiju was coming! In an instant he was wide awake.

While he knew a few storeys above him LOCCENT and the Jaeger crews were kicking into high gear, he had enough time to grab himself some breakfast before he had to report to the helicopter bay, where the HH 60 Jayhawk SAR helicopter was on standby. Officially they were the personal rescue team for the Jaeger, should the mission go awry, but truth to be told, when a Kaiju finished off a Jaeger usually there was not much left to rescue. Piloting was pretty much a win or die operation, while Shatterdome SAR helicopter crews all over the Pacific were usually busy enough with civilian victims.

He went over to his computer console and called up the weather report. It announced lousy flight weather that night although by morning there was a chance that the late spring snow storm would abate. Nothing that their faithful old Jayhawk couldn't handle of course. He made it to his tiny bathroom, after a quick shower he took a little extra time to make himself presentable, running a hand through his greying, short cropped hair he observing the prominent scar that adorned his cheek since a helicopter crash in 2017. Spring 2020 marked his fifth year with PPDC as a part of the pan European support mission. Europe had an interest to keep the Kaiju out of the Bering Strait and after the sheer magnitude of the defence necessary had become apparent, the UN had blackmailed, persuaded, pleaded the blissfully uninvolved, mostly rather phlegmatic and indecisive Europeans into helping until they had agreed to convert Airbus industries Hamburg into a Jaeger assembly line and provided scientists and staff for the Shatterdomes. In cooperation with some of the top European armament groups Hamburg now churned out Jaegers instead of holiday cruisers, usually 4 or 5 per year, supplying those countries that were unable to build them themselves, mainly south America and Australia, who had closer ties to Europe and the island nations, that were more of a humanitarian case.

When Kaiju made landfall, they usually homed in on the most densely populated areas or industrial centres, that was the reason why of the thousands of miles of coast line that Alaska had to offer, the Kaiju had chosen to pay a visit to Anchorage. As cynical as it sounded, in a way that made defence against them easier. To fight them there was no need to go out to find the Kaiju, the monsters found them and all they had to do was having Jaegers ready in all densely inhabitated regions.

Of course the choice which city got a Shatterdome and Jaegers first, and which didn't had been a cause for mass riots and political turnoil. Cities that were fortunate enough to have a Shatterdome dispatched Jaegers by freighter when a Kaiju was found heading in the direction of an undefended area, but only a year ago it had taken days to bring in Crimson Emperor from China when a category three suddenly appeared at the shores of Kuala Lumpur and ravaged the city for nearly a week. And then the beast had played hide and seek with the Jaeger in the hills. It had been a disaster. The scientists didn't really know why the Kaiju behaved the way they behaved, his favourite theory being that they were attracted by the pollution. Maybe they just enjoyed playing mikado with sky scrapers, maybe there was more of a plan behind these attacks, nobody really knew.

But everyone knew that the alternative to Jaegers was in most cases a grim one: Tactical nuclear warheads . The only other solution to a Kaiju on the rampage. Russian and US submarines armed with cruise missiles patrolled the pacific as the ultima ratio weapon against them and so far four of the beasts had to be terminated that way. But in densely populated areas they really were the last resort. Frankly speaking, it was a miracle that there were any people left living in those undefended cities at all, but he guessed the inhabitants didn't have much of a choice there, they had to scrape a living from wherever was available, despite the danger. Where would a hundred million people go, particularly in the more underdeveloped countries of the pacific regions? Some had relatives in more remote villages or inland, but the rest were just hanging on to their lives, ignoring the threat at best as they could. The poorer nations kept complaining that the rich nations abandoned them. And who could blame them? The region of Kuala Lumpur had been populated by about 10 Million inhabitants, of which roughly ten percent died directly or indirectly during and after the attack, Anchorage had half a million, but had a Shatterdome and two Jaegers. And the main reason for the Jaegers in Alaska was the protection of the oil and gas fields anyway. No, in his opinion not everything was going all right with the PPDC program.

So why had he joined it in the first place, exposing himself to that madness instead of staying in safe and comfortable Norway? Easy. After his rather messy divorce in 2014 he had felt the urge for a radical change in his life, for a work in the military that was actually giving him the impression he was doing something worthwhile for the world, and that's what he got when he volunteered for this all new anti alien monster outfit. Musing about his fifth anniversary in the PPDC he grabbed his grey flight suit from the small wardrobe, pulled on his combat boots and on the way out slid into his warm jacket.

"Hey Doc," he heard a voice behind him when he was about to turn left into the corridor that lead to the mass hall D, the only one that was open 24 hours. He recognized it as belonging to the sturdy Texan hydraulic technician he had treated the week before, with a nasty cut on his upper arm.

"You've been on the night shift? I told you I didn't like to see you back at work so soon. How are the stitches holding?" he pointed out.

"Just fine," the other man muttered in his thick southern accent. "Not much into hiking in that god damned snow hole, so what else to do?"

He muttered his agreement to that as they took the few steps down into the mass hall that had the charme of a second rate factory.

"But at least them Beckett boys get some alien butt to kick tonight, ey? Was about time our fat babies see some action," he cheerily added, pumping a fist, then patting him on the shoulder before he slouched off to the far side of the hall, greeting some of his buddies that were already eating.

Free from the clutches of the trigger happy Texan he homed in on the the buffet. If you weren't into cross country skiing or dog sledding, or bird watching, and if you didn't like the cold there was indeed not much you could do to spend your off duty time. But the supply of coffee was hot and strong as always and the food was reasonably good, for the moment that was all that mattered to him.

Due to the deployment of Gipsy, that Jaeger's maintenance team's shift had ended early, so excited Jaeger ground crews began to pour into the mass hall with a buzz when he sat down at one of the more remote tables.

There was a chance that he was going to be busy all day, he didn't want to waste his energy on the latest claptrap with a bunch of anxious techs. A Shatterdome was populated with people from all walks of life, from physicists to welders, from pilots to crane drivers, from technicians to cooks, from soldiers to UN supervisors, it was meant to keep up the resemblance to something akin to a military unit, with ranks, uniforms and all the other paraphenalia, but in reality it was far from your average military base and certainly the most shockingly different experience from what he had been used to with the air force. It was one part hostel, one part campus, two parts steel mill, two parts military and three parts madness. And not even Marshall Pentecost, the highest ranking PPDC officer on the north American continent, a no nonsense military man, could do much about that fact. You just couldn't shoo a bunch of highly qualified civilians back in line with a few barked orders. He was too long in this outfit to even bat an eyelid at something as informal as a casual 'hey Doc' at two thirty in the morning by one of his patients.

The purpose for which this base was built, for which they worked so hard each day, killing off Kaiju, filled only a tiny fraction of their time. The main part of his job in this huge machinery was keeping the Shatterdome healthy, most of his days consisted of everything from more or less nasty work accidents to the bi weekly routine health checks on the pilots, to the struggle to contain outbreaks of the common cold. You couldn't have the precious pilots down with a flu when a Kaiju made landfall, couldn't you, and with over 2000 people living and working together so closely anyone who showed even remote symptoms had to report in and be quaranteened immediately.

He took his time as he munched away on his bacon and eggs and a bagel uninterrupted, then he tossed his tray onto a trolley and made his way to the helicotper bay.

Anchorage shatterdome housed two Jaegers, but since the older machine, the four year old Mark II Chrome Brutus was currently undergoing major updates it was up to Gipsy Danger, piloted by the infamous Becket brothers to intercept the alien.

Those young men and women they all depended on were mostly nice enough folks, but he kept his distance. He had been serving long enough in places like Afghanistan before the Kaiju had raised their ugly heads. Those out at the front lines could be dead by tomorrow, so professional distance was advisable. He'd heard that the Beckett brother's deployment to Alaska had been a transfer for disciplinary reasons, for sneaking off base in their free time or a host of other things, he didn't know if it was true, it was never officially confirmed, but judging by his personal experience with these two he found it entirely possible. After all, they were young, unless a Kaiju attacked Shatterdome life certainly had it's limits and for the outside world successful Jaeger pilots had celebrity status.

As a rule, the PPDC was more lenient with their pilots than the air force would ever have been. Why? Simply because it was not as easy to replace them. Finding drift compatible pilot teams that harmonized, that had the fighting spirit and intuition it took to slay these things while walking around in an oversized tin can was like searching the needle in a haystack, it took way more than to become a fighter jet pilot. To survive they needed that right amount of ego, that spirit of resistance and independent thinking that tended to get recruits kicked out of any regular army pretty fast, plus, at the same time they needed the ability to cooperate and that absolute trust in their partner. So with a promising pair the PPDC tended to make concessions. They went to quite some extent to keep them happy, too, because everyone knew, in the end most of them would die eventually. It was a small gesture of gratitude for their sacrifice while they lived. But of course, sneaking off base to party was eventually going to have consequences, even for Jaeger aces.

He took the elevator up to the roof top hangars and was greeted by his pilot, Captain Smith, a burly US navy man, and his paramedic. He quickly crossed the hall and jumped into their helicopter for short checkup of all the medical supplies, not that it was really necessary, it was the paramedic's job to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be but he was a thorough man, some even said he was pedantic.

He glanced at his watch. Almost 3 o'clock. "So, how are things going," he asked the co pilot, who was sitting in the cockpit, busy fixing something on his helmet. "The damn bug has just passed Ninilchik," he muttered, looking up from his work with a glint of unease in his eyes.

"Ah," he replied. That meant about 90 minutes until scheduled intercept. Involuntarily his tension rose at that thought of the impending enemy contact. There was no need to sit in the helicopter while waiting, though. "How about a game of cards to kill the time?"

"Good idea," the young man replied, quickly finished whatever he was doing and followed him to the cosily warm staffroom at the back of the hangar. It was already packed full with the Jaeger transport helicopter crews that were also on standby and he took the time to greet some that he knew. The co pilot had already picked a deck of cards from one of the cupboards.

"Rummy?"

Muttering agreement they gathered around the battered table in the corner and the winch man, a wiry redhead with a soft Irish accent began to deal the cards.

They didn't look up from it until 45 minutes later a low whirring reverberated through the concrete floor. The rise of adrenaline in the room was palpable. Gipsy was powering up. Now it was getting serious. His pilot hurried to supervise the utility vehicle that was pulling the Jayhawk out onto the helipad. Nobody wanted to miss out on Gipsy's deployment, so they all slipped into their heavy weather gear and despite the storm hurried over to the edge of the air field, small like a group of ants on the roof of the giant structure of the Shatterdome.

Suddenly the whole base made of steel enforced concrete shuddered. The chattering of them men died down and even the most seasoned among them exchanged portentious glances. Underneath them, the hangar doors were opening with a deep rumbling, not for a training run, but for the actual thing. They watched how slowly the collossal form of the Jaeger was hauled out of the hangar on it's tansport platform.

Anchorage Shatterdome was not situated in Anchorage itself but at the narrowest point of the Cook Inlet, near Nikiski, at the strategically best position to protect Anchoarge bay and the oil and gas fields that the USA depended on so much in these troubled times.

Like a giant sentinel of mankind Gipsy strode out into the darkness, majestic and terrifieing, churning up the ocean around her, until her lights were swallowed by the driving sleet and the rumbling thunder of her footsteps was drowned out in the storm.


End file.
